Corpus Linguistics is the statistical study of large text collections or ‘corpora’. It has considerable overlap with Computational Linguistics, although, in practice, the two disciplines have very different priorities, with one centrally focused on phenomena in what philosophers call ‘natural language’ and the other centrally focused on the algorithmic processing and production of such language. Both have application in the study of human culture, much of which is encoded in text.

In this presentation, I will introduce and discuss my own research on texts produced within two very different online communities: YouTube users commenting on conspiracy theory videos and Archive of Our Own (AO3) members writing fanfiction: works of prose fiction created on the basis of intellectual property associated with mass media franchises such as Harry Potter and My Hero Academia, but without authorisation from the intellectual property owners. In doing so, I will also explain the principles of the New Statistics, and on what I have learnt from the endeavour to reimagine corpus linguistic modes of analysis in their light — an endeavour which has necessarily involved the development of new computational tools.

Speaker's Info:

Dr Daniel Allington is Reader in Cultural Analytics in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. His published research spans multiple fields, ranging from Extremism Studies to the History of the Book.